June Lloyd (Baroness Lloyd of Highbury)

摘要

Leading paediatrician who was instrumental in the creation of the UK's Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Bom Jan 1,1928, in Gilgit, Kashmir, she died on June 28,2006, in Aylesbury, UK, aged 78 years.Few people are immortalised in a heraldic coat of arms. June Lloyd's place in history, however, is confirmed in the shield of the UK's Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health alongside Thomas Phaire, who wrote the first book on paediatrics in the English language in 1545, and a baby adapted from the coat of arms of the Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields. Baroness Lloyd, as she became in 1997, was a remarkable woman who earned this compliment not only as one of the founders of the college, but also as one of the leading paediatricians of her day and a pioneering example to women in medicine."She is an example to us of what can be achieved and showed us that we should not accept that the higher roles are not for women, because they certainly are", said Patricia Hamilton, the current-and first woman-president of the college, who knew Lloyd. "She was very much a role model for women. She was a doctor at a time when it was not so easy to be at the top of your profession as a woman." These days 60% of trainee paediatricians in the UK are women. But after Lloyd qualified in medicine at Bristol University, in 1951, she was advised that she should try a specialty thatwas less male-dominated and competitive than paediatrics. But she persevered and ended up at Birmingham University as research assistant to Otto Wolff, who became her friend and mentor. It was at Birmingham that she developed her research interest in child obesity caused by inherited disorders of fat metabolism. Her major research contribution was the discovery that children with a-(3-lipoproteinaemia are unable to absorb vitamin E, which enabled doctors to treat them and prevent neurological damage. She became widely known as an authority on lipid disorders in children.